Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.

Notes on the Death of Google Reader

So everyone’s going apeshit over the impending death of Google Reader. Can we keep a bit of perspective on this please?

– We loved and used RSS before Google Reader, and we’ll continue to love and use RSS long after it’s gone.

– Google Reader is just another RSS client. OK, its community integration features were unique, but as a pure client, there always have been, and will always continue to be, lots of far superior alternatives.

– This has nothing to do with “the death of open standards.” Nothing is happening to the RSS standard, for godssake.

– What do you expect from free software? A lifetime commitment?

I’ll grant that the big problem here is that Reader has become the default backing store for other clients. In fact, my favorite RSS client by far, Reeder, uses Google Reader as a storage and sync mechanism. Hopefully, Reeder will act quickly to enable other aggregators to fill that role, or to let us add feeds independently of a central aggregator. If it doesn’t, I’ll find one that does. Because, after all, that’s what all RSS aggregators did before Reader existed.

It’s not that big of a loss. RSS lives.

Thank God they spared Orkut.

Update: Reeder has already stated that they’ll live on after the death of Reader.

Here are 50+ Reader replacements either working now or on the horizon.